Between Iraq and a Hard Place – 9, New Crusade and an Unrepentant Antichrist

Friends,
The Bush administration has had few successes to crow about in the black cemetery crow fields of the dead from Arlington VA, to the sand blasted tombs of the dead outside of Ramadi, Iraq. We are constantly reminded by President Bush of the one “good” thing his invasion accomplished. True “them weapuns of mass deestrukshun” weren’t found, and true, “freedhumb” for Iraqis has come at a higher cost in lives and treasure than he expected, but the Cowboy in Chief has ridden in to glory astride a White “House” about one thing. The rationale for war is defended by a rhetorical question: Isn’t Iraq better now without eeevil Saddam Hussein and with freedum? That oft repeated pitch is getting as annoying as that CNN Head-On commercial for hemorrhoidal cream: “From the makers of Head-On, Operation Iraqi FREEdHEM. FREEdHEM! Apply being better off where it hurts.

Answering for Saddam’s prophetic significance caught and dead requires we first address a third element. What did Saddam’s capture and fall from power do to his stature as one of the top candidates for Nostradamus’ most talked about prophetic topic these days–who is the man code named “Mabus,” his “Third Antichrist?” People asked me in essence the following question in emails by the burnt server full starting the month of his capture, December 2003:

Does Saddam Hussein’s capture take him out of the running for Nostradamus’ “Mabus“?

This is what I said back then three years and three months ago. The brackets are mine from today for clarification:

In my opinion, it has put him back in the running. The American occupying forces might rue the day Saddam Hussein did not fight and die like his two sons, when cornered. If Saddam Hussein faces a very public trial the Americans will need to find some way to save themselves from being viewed and accomplices in many of his crimes against humanity in the 1980s. Saddam on the witness stand could talk about the years the US provided him with the satellite targeting intelligence and the materials to make his weapons of mass destruction. The same weapons that gassed five thousand civilian Kurds “and” hundreds of thousands of Iranian soldiers during the Iraq-Iran War. He could implicate [the twice serving former US Secretary of State for the Ford and G.W. Bush administrations], Donald Rumsfeld, and many others in the current Bush administration who had a hands-on relationship with supporting the Iraqi dictator in the past as their surrogate foe against the Ayatollahs of Iran. Saddam could weave lies with truth and successfully propagate the illusion that he is a martyred hero of the downtrodden Arabs and stir radical elements across the Islamic world. Finally, Saddam might face a public execution that could make his name a rallying cry of Islamic fundamentalists for the coming 27 years of terrorism. Thus as quatrain 62 of Century 2 in Nostradamus’ prophecies states: “Mabus [Saddam] soon dies” and he becomes the rallying cry for “a terrible destruction of people and animals.” Or, as Quatrain 77 of Century 8 adds, “The third Antichrist is very soon annihilated.” The Arab/Islamic world could remember Saddam’s trial as a farce of western Crusaders and their puppet Iraqi government. His public execution becomes martyrdom. Moreover, his martyrdom triggers the war of the Third Antichrist: “Twenty-seven years his bloody war will last…”

There are other scenarios, of course–other candidates who may fall early in their war, such as President Bush or Usama bin Laden and trigger a generation of new fighters and conflict. We shall have to see. If American leaders wish to avoid a scandal of historic proportions, they should block public access to the courtroom and keep Saddam Hussein sedated and mentally compromised throughout the coming trial.

ASSESSMENT (April 2007):
Saddam Hussein’s trial began 19 October 2005 before a Special Tribunal trained by US legal mentors and guarded within the US Green Zone in Baghdad by US soldiers. It was televised, until shameful and sometimes macabre court antics and shout matches between the judges and Saddam saw the live feed cut. There was no focus on US involvement in Saddam’s dictatorship. Either by intent or coincidence, the crux of this trial settled on allegations that Hussein and seven other defendants committed crimes against humanity with regard to events that took place after a failed assassination attempt in Dujail in 1982 by members of the Islamic Dawa Party. One could wonder why there was no public trial about Saddam gassing Kurds. Could it be that the Iraqi court’s US handlers might be embarrassed by Saddam’s defense lawyers presenting evidence of US culpability in exporting the materials and technical knowledge to build chemical weapons of mass destruction? Would the former Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld be called as a witness to explain just what he said as an envoy of the US to Saddam in the early 1980s? Did Rumsfeld and the Reagan Administration give Hussein the means to gas people?

There is now a notorious picture floating around the internet of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein in Baghdad on 19 December 1983. Rumsfeld was then a first time around former Secretary of Defense for the Ford Administration. He went to Baghdad as a special envoy of President Reagan. Rumsfeld visited again on 24 March 1984. On that same day, the UN released its report that Iraq had used mustard gas and tabun nerve agent against Iranian troops. The New York Times reported from Baghdad on 29 March 1984, “American diplomats pronounce themselves satisfied with Iraq and the U.S., and suggest that normal diplomatic ties have been established in all but name.”

Ten months after the first and publicly televised trial of Saddam Hussein began, another was convened trying him and six co-defendants in abstentia for genocide during the Anfal military campaign against the Kurds of Northern Iraq. No TV show trial, that, with the focus of media attention trained on Saddam’s soap opera of a legal proceeding elsewhere. Indeed, within four months the Kurdish trial and those planned for other crimes against humanity committed by Saddam were discontinued after a rush to render death by hanging for the Dujail massacre proceeded on 30 December 2006. The preliminary stages of execution were filmed by the US backed and financed Al Hurra TV station. Nothing more broadcast about this execution was planned. But soon a home movie of the whole execution would help give birth to Saddam’s new image as a dead martyr sacrificed by Shia thugs in the minds of many Sunni Iraqi nationalists and Arab Sunnis across the region.

A public execution did happen, as I predicted back on 31 December 2003, the most public of them all. A cell phone secretly filmed the sordid affair soon to be posted across the world on YouTube. The whole world watched, and still “can” watch the execution of Saddam in a video phone’s stuttering shutter tangle of glaring light and shifting shadows of hooded men, lurching in and out of an unsteady hand’s broadcast from somewhere in the shadows back against the wall of the dank, moldy smelling execution chamber. It is said the President Bush upon viewing the cell phone hanging shook his head in disgust for the way the al-Maliki government made Saddam Hussein’s execution appear like a lynching, a revenge killing.

The “Black One” did make the “Angry One” Saddam repent in his last moments, or, at least tried.

The cell phone movie recorded (black hooded Shia guards) mocking Saddam standing on the trap door moments before his hanging with an obscenely huge noose knot chaffing the left side of his neck and face. They chanted the name of “Muqtada” three times, rapidly. Sort of sounded like the Saturday Night Live deli chef yelling, “Cheeseburger-cheeseburger-cheeseburger…!”

Saddam Hussein sneered a cynical smile and asked in Arabic, “Is this how you show your Arab manhood?”

The statement cuts more than a Westerner would know. He implied that no manly Arab would praise a puppet thrall of the non-Arab Iranians, like al-Sadr. Saddam at death’s threshold lived up to his name to the last (Saddam in Arabic means “the one who confronts”). He was making a pro-Sunni Arab statement in final defiance of a government and justice system he had continually raged against and denounced during his trial as a pawn of the US and the Iranians.

The al-Maliki government stepped clumsily into their roles as Saddam Hussein had wished: as murderers of a great Sunni Arab leader. Shi’ites were the only ones physically present witnessing the killing. No Kurds or Sunnis need apply. They were excluded. The rush to hang Saddam for a Shia-only atrocity excluded forever public trials forcing Saddam to face his Sunni and Kurd victims, which were minion. Adding insult to religious blasphemy, the Shia government made a point to display extreme disrespect to every majority Sunni Muslim in the Middle East and the world. They killed a prominent Sunni Dictator–a figurehead in Sunni culture who, for better or worse, is thought of as a father of a nation–at dawn prayers on their scheduled day for beginning the holy celebration of Eid al-Adha. This is the festival of forgiveness and victory in faith marking the end of the Hajj pilgrimage. Shia’s celebrate Eid al-Adha a day later.

At the time of final edits for this article (12 April 2007), Saddam Hussein’s body is enshrined alongside his sons near Tikrit in Awja, the village of his birth in Anbhar Province, Iraq. The pilgrimage of vengeful Sunnis has begun.

Gazan al-Jabouri for Reuters reported the day after his hanging (31 December 2006) that, “In an outpouring of grief and anger from Saddam’s fellow Sunni Arabs at the Shi’ite-led government that rushed through the execution, mourners knelt and prayed by his tomb over which the Iraqi flag had been draped…”

A person in the crowd from Mosul decried, “The Persians have killed him. I can’t believe it. By God, we will take revenge.”

A Sunni Iraqi calling Arab Shias “Persians” is a racial slur tying the Iraqi majority and the al-Maliki government responsible for Saddam’s hanging together as lackeys of the non-Arab Persian-speaking Shia Iranians. What al-Jabouri overlooks is the general opinion held by the sizeable Sunni minority that the Iranians prop as puppets the al-Maliki government. There can be no peace or community shared under an Iranian controlled “democracy.”

Another mourner passing before the tomb of Saddam and his sons was heard to say, “All we can do now is take it out against the Americans and the government.”

Symbolic funerals were held all across Sunni quarters of Iraq wherein many swore revenge. Since that time the Sunni insurrection continues to gain violent momentum. The Shia controlled Iraqi government has made a monster into a mentor for freedom, a hellion into a hero for future generations of Sunni Arab resistance to all things Shi’ite.

Before he was hanged, Saddam Hussein made a prediction:

“When I die, so dies Iraq!”

Will a tyrant in the end become a prophet? In Part 5, we journey through prophecies of national implosion and sectarian civil war.

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John Hogue

"For real democracy to flower, you first need a real humanity." - John Hogue bio. Author of 20 books in 19 languages, "Rogue" scholar, world authority on Nostradamus and the prophetic traditions of the world.